5/8 - Poetry Double Header
NPP PRESENTS:
Eric Ekstrand, Hannah Gamble & Sean Bishop
Poems @ Fergie’s Pub (1214 Sansom St) @ 6 pm
+
Eugene Ostashevsky, Carolina Maugeri & Kyle Conner
Poems @ Chapterhouse Cafe (620 S 9th St) @ 8 pm
Hannah Gamble: A postcard hanging in Hannah’s dining room reads “Hanna is mean.” Upon finding it in a box of old photos, Hannah hung the postcard, though she doesn’t know who wrote it. Hannah studies poetry at the University of Houston, where she teaches Intro. to Short Fiction and serves as the Reviews/ Interviews Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Mid-American Review and others.
Eric Ekstrand is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston where he holds an Inprint/Brown Foundation Fellowship and teaches writing. He is a poetry editor at Gulf Coast. In 2009 he was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, awarded by the Poetry Foundation.
——
Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet from New York City. His poetry books include Iterature and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, which employs characters such as MC Squared, Peepeesaurus, the Begriffon and, of course, DJ Spinoza, to explore the shortcomings of axiomatic systems with the insouciance and energy of Saturday-morning cartoons. He has edited an English-language anthology of Russian absurdist writings of the 1930s by such authors as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. His PhD dissertation was on the history of zero. He teaches at New York University.
Carolina Maugeri: Transcription, auto-correction, revision, & improvisation, & the personal-to-cultural tensions & histrionics that arise from such activities, make up her main poetic preoccupations. In addition to writing, she likes to make music, surveys, sketches, & explores sound & textures through vocal phonic utterances, typewriter taps, multi-instrumental manipulations within interrupted songscapes. She lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches writing & literature to visual artists at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Kyle Conner is a poet who works and lives in Philadelphia with his keeshond Sam. His chapbooks are: Songs for South St. Bridge (1996), The Pulverized Thing of Doubt (2002), Toward Belief (2005) and breaths for f l e s h (2008). He has been involved with the Philadelphia literary scene for over 15 years and has given numerous readings in various venues. He co-curated the Highwire Reading Series from 1998-2000 and is the nominal spokesman for the theory of “Oughtism” (because you Ought to know), which makes the obvious explicit: that art is never more or less than an extension of the way one chooses to live one’s life.
